Standing With Afghan Women

In the five years since the Taliban seized power in Kabul on August 15, 2021, Afghan women have become the most persistent source of resistance to the group’s efforts to transform Afghanistan. The exclusion of women and girls from public space is at the center of the Taliban’s extremist state-building project—a project that has also included dismantling institutions, subordinating the judiciary to religious authority, eliminating political opposition and civic activity, silencing independent media, and diverting male and young female students from schools with broad-based formal curricula to madrasahs that instill the Taliban’s ideology.

Many Afghan women are refusing to accept this radical transformation of Afghanistan’s social and political order. Some are protesting in the streets despite the extraordinary threats they face. Others are organizing underground schools to fill gaps in education and collaborating closely with Afghans in exile to prepare legal action against the Taliban’s abuses. Against the odds, Afghan women have built a tenacious resistance movement, inside and outside the country, that is working to alleviate conditions and provide opportunities, however limited, for women and girls.

Yet most foreign governments, including those who have publicly condemned the Taliban’s swift and sweeping repression of women since 2021, have done little to support Afghan women’s efforts. Indeed, many are expanding their diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, which may further embolden the group to tighten its repression and advance its extreme policies. The Taliban’s odious treatment of women should in itself be sufficient to compel foreign countries to reconsider their approach. But the strides the Afghan women’s movement has made offers them another reason to resist normalization and instead to invest directly in Afghan people. Afghan women are the most organized constituency resisting the Taliban’s hardline agenda—and they are preserving the human capital, institutions, and political networks with which a stable and pluralistic Afghanistan could one day be rebuilt.

STILL IN THE FIGHT

Afghan women had received education and participated in professional life—if unevenly—for decades before the Taliban first seized power in 1996 and imposed oppressive policies that dismantled women’s rights and opportunities. After the Taliban regime fell in 2001, Afghanistan, with the support of the United States and other international partners, made remarkable strides in restoring and advancing the rights of the country’s women and girls. By 2021, an entire generation of women had grown up with some access to education. Women, especially in urban centers, worked as doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, and public servants. They became a significant presence in political life, filling more than a quarter of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament and serving as ministers and diplomats.

After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the group swiftly imposed policies that reversed decades of progress for women and girls. In addition to barring women’s access to education, employment, and public services, it dismantled key institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and the High Commission to Eliminate Violence Against Women. The regime also closed women’s shelters, imposed a strict dress code, and restricted women’s access to public spaces. Every year, these measures have become more expansive and entrenched, reinforced by the 2024 Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and the promulgation of more than a hundred decrees that touch on nearly every aspect of women’s lives. More than 3,000 morality inspectors have been deployed across the country to enforce the Taliban’s decrees in public spaces and to pressure male family members to ensure women’s compliance within the home. One former civil society worker described the suffocating effect of these laws in testimony related to the UN Security Council, commenting, “I am afraid that they will ban women from breathing without a man’s permission.” Another Afghan woman compared living under the Taliban to “being buried alive.” 

Yet even in these draconian conditions, Afghan women have continued to fight for their rights, meeting the Taliban’s repression with extraordinary acts of courage. Within weeks of the group’s return to power, scores of women marched through the streets of Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and other cities to demand that the Taliban reverse their newly introduced restrictions. The UN has documented the Taliban’s brutal response to these demonstrations, which has included arbitrary arrests of protesters and their families, enforced disappearances, rape, torture, and other forms of intimidation and violence. Yet women activists have remained defiant, and at times they have drawn support from men. In June of this year, women and men in Herat took to the streets to protest the detention of at least 30 women for allegedly violating the Taliban-imposed dress code. According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban security forces responded with beatings, shots into the crowd, detentions of protesters, and the killing of at least one boy.

As the Taliban have intensified their repression, women have found new ways to continue nonviolent resistance. Women’s groups have become more decentralized and clandestine. As during the first Taliban regime in the 1990s, women activists have organized underground schools to educate girls denied access to formal classrooms. Women who have been shut out of the professional careers they enjoyed before 2021 have mobilized to offer services that the Taliban eliminated. They have opened their own small business and informal enterprises, and they are negotiating with local Taliban officials and community leaders to allow them to keep those businesses operating, to run educational programs, and to provide access to health care and other basic services. Afghan women are also working closely with UN offices, international human rights organizations, and legal experts to document human rights abuses and preserve evidence of arbitrary detentions and gender-based violence.

Women inside Afghanistan and those who were forced into exile have developed increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching networks that not only put a spotlight on the Taliban’s abuses but also call on foreign governments, the UN, and other international institutions and donors to limit their engagement with the Taliban, sustain humanitarian assistance, and protect refugees. Their speaking engagements and social media campaigns have sustained public attention even as international media coverage has faded. And online organizing has helped them navigate constraints such as the Taliban’s restriction of women’s movement inside Afghanistan and visa rules preventing those in exile from traveling internationally.

Afghan women in the diaspora and their allies have also been working to hold the Taliban accountable for their repression. Together, they have pushed governments participating in UN negotiations over a new treaty on crimes against humanity to include recognition of gender apartheid—a system designed to permanently subordinate and exclude women from public life—as a distinct crime under international law. Although the process for incorporating this concept into legal frameworks is long and uncertain, the idea has gained traction among policy leaders; the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, for example, has described the Taliban’s policies as “gender apartheid” and “gender persecution.” Calling out the Taliban’s system for what it is can be valuable in itself, as it raises the political costs for those moving toward normalization.

Afghan activists are also finding new ways to pursue accountability for the Taliban’s abuses. Last year in Madrid, four Afghan civil society organizations established the People’s Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan under the auspices of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international civil society organization that investigates serious human rights violations. Although the tribunal does not hold binding legal authority, it provides an opportunity to establish evidence and develop legal arguments that could inform future prosecutions and advance international law on gender persecution and gender apartheid. In a series of public hearings, Afghan lawyers, researchers, and survivors of Taliban abuses laid out a case that the Taliban’s systematic repression and exclusion of women and girls since 2021 amounts to gender persecution, which is recognized as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. In December, the tribunal issued its final judgment in The Hague—a symbolic choice given the city’s role as a center of international justice—upholding the charge of gender persecution. The judges also concluded that Afghanistan today qualifies as an “apartheid-like system” and recommended that gender apartheid be codified in international law.

The work that Afghan women are doing today is essential to preserving the possibility of a peaceful and economically viable Afghanistan. The Taliban’s exclusion of women is not just a violation of human rights; it is also eroding the country’s human and economic capital. UNICEF has estimated that restrictions on girls’ education and women’s employment are already costing Afghanistan at least $84 million in annual economic output—a significant sum in an impoverished country where nearly three-quarters of the population is struggling to meet basic needs. The Taliban’s madrasahs, meanwhile, are teaching the next generation to adhere to the group’s hardline ideology. It is the underground schools that are preserving access to the kind of education that will support a pluralistic society and prepare young Afghans for a post-Taliban future. And independent civic organizations are the bodies sustaining the professional expertise and institutional knowledge that will be needed to one day rebuild the country.

SMART INVESTMENT

Despite the extraordinary work of Afghan women to resist the Taliban, foreign engagement with Kabul has done very little to recognize or support their efforts. Instead, several foreign governments have concluded that some form of transactional relationship with the Taliban is the safest route to containing extremism, managing migration, and stabilizing the country. Although Russia is the only country that has formally recognized the Taliban government, China has accepted the credentials of a Taliban-appointed ambassador, and several countries in the region are expanding their diplomatic and economic ties with Kabul. Even the European Commission recently invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss migration issues in talks attended by 15 EU member states. Foreign officials raise and condemn the repression of women and girls in such engagements, but it is often clear to the Taliban that these concerns are not their interlocutors’ top priorities. Thus, as the Taliban increases their repression, the diplomatic costs they face are diminishing rather than increasing.

The last five years should serve as sufficient proof that further cooperation with the Taliban will not moderate the group’s behavior. Despite U.S., EU, and UN Security Council demands that the Taliban prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a safe haven, for example, the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team has found that the Taliban maintain a “close and symbiotic” relationship with al-Qaeda and that several other extremist organizations continue to operate in the country.

Some interaction with the Taliban may be unavoidable, but foreign governments should not take steps that confer legitimacy on the regime, which would only embolden the group to deepen its repression at home. Instead, they should restrict their contact with the Taliban to existing diplomatic channels and craft policies that prioritize Afghanistan’s long-term stability.

Protesting in Kabul, Afghanistan, December 2021 Ali Khara / Reuters

Part of that effort must include the meaningful inclusion of Afghan women in international diplomacy. The Taliban regime systematically excludes half the population from any kind of political representation; the rest of the world should not follow suit. Diplomatic efforts today too often grant the Taliban a formal place at the table while limiting contact with Afghan women to informal consultations. At other times when a government has systematically denied political participation to a substantial part of its population, most notably in the case of apartheid South Africa, international institutions have devised innovative ways to include those denied political representation. The same can be done with Afghanistan. The UN should establish a formal mechanism that integrates Afghan women into formal, substantive deliberations related to Afghanistan’s future. Such meaningful participation would send a clear message that the UN and its members reject the Taliban’s claim to be the sole political voice of Afghanistan as long as the group excludes half the population from public life. It would also ensure that decisions about Afghanistan are informed and shaped by actors representing constituencies beyond the Taliban.

Governments and donors should also provide humanitarian assistance and sustained institutional support to Afghan women–led organizations inside and outside Afghanistan. I have heard from Afghan women that cuts to international humanitarian and development assistance, including the loss of funding for education, health clinics, and women-led organizations, have harmed them as much as the Taliban’s policies have. Indeed, more than 100 UN-supported community health facilities closed last year; 50 percent of women working for civil society organizations inside Afghanistan surveyed by UN Women in 2025 had lost their jobs because of funding cuts. If a women’s movement is to confront an authoritarian order, it needs resources. Even modest funding can help if it arrives without restrictions and is guaranteed for several years, enabling staff to focus on building relationships, conducting research, and engaging in sustained political advocacy rather than constantly pursuing short-term grants.

One cause in particular need of investment is the education and professional development of Afghan women and girls. Foreign governments and donors should consult with Afghan women to determine how their money will best be spent. But as a starting point, they should support accredited online and in-person education programs, scholarships for educational opportunities inside and outside the country, professional fellowships in neighboring countries, visa facilitation for opportunities abroad, and the distribution of computers, software, and satellite technologies to Afghan students and professionals.

Foreign governments must also protect Afghans who have fled Taliban rule. Iran and Pakistan together have forced out millions of Afghans who sought refuge in those countries, effectively condemning the women and girls among them to suffer the Taliban’s persecution. Governments with negotiating leverage over Tehran or Islamabad, including Western governments, should press them to halt these forced returns. Countries such as Germany that have signed deals with the Taliban to allow them to deport Afghan migrants to Afghanistan should reconsider such arrangements. Wealthier countries should also provide greater assistance to those hosting refugees. These protections are an investment in Afghanistan’s future. The diaspora networks that Afghan women and men are building today hold the expertise, relationships, and institutional capacity that could prove critical to reconstructing the Afghan state when a political opening emerges—the same way Afghan refugee communities played a vital role in rebuilding the country after the Taliban’s fall in 2001.

The United States has a particular responsibility to protect the Afghan women who worked with American institutions, in civil society organizations, or as human rights defenders before the Taliban takeover and have since left Afghanistan. Some have been stranded in third countries since Washington suspended its refugee admissions program in January 2025 and subsequently imposed sweeping restrictions on the entry of Afghan nationals. The U.S. government must resume processing and admitting Afghans referred for U.S. refugee resettlement and restore viable pathways for vulnerable Afghans, particularly women and girls, to apply for refugee resettlement. It should also restore the Temporary Protected Status that applied to Afghans already in the United States until the Trump administration terminated it in July 2025.

Finally, foreign governments must support efforts to hold the Taliban accountable for its abuses. The United Nations’ Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan, its Office of the Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan, and Afghan women–led initiatives to gather evidence for legal proceedings all require funding to support their work and pay their staff. Afghan women campaigning for the codification of international laws on gender persecution and gender apartheid also need sustained diplomatic backing from foreign governments if they are to advance their agenda.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

For too long, Afghan women have been placed at the center of others’ political projects but excluded from actual policy decisions. After the U.S.-led 2001 military intervention, Western governments pointed to women’s hard-won rights as symbols of success but then denied women seats at the table in negotiations with the Taliban that culminated in the group’s return. Now, the Taliban have built their radical vision for Afghan society on a policy of gender apartheid. Although there is no moral equivalence between the two, both are manifestations of the same problem. The Western countries that spent 20 years helping a generation of Afghan women gain the education and training necessary to advance their positions in society, only to largely abandon them after 2021, should recognize the moral and strategic imperative of helping those who today are continuing that fight in the harshest of conditions. It is not up to Western countries to “save” Afghan women. But these governments do need to reckon with the sins of the past and break a destructive cycle by meaningfully aiding these women’s efforts to shape their country’s direction in every way they can.

A durable political order can come only from the Afghan people themselves—it can be neither imposed by external actors nor negotiated with those who suppress the majority of the population. Afghan women are essential to this project. They had proved their resilience, creativity, and strategic thinking long ago, but their resistance to Taliban rule over the past five years has served as further confirmation. A pluralistic and peaceful Afghanistan is in the world’s interest. To support the struggle of Afghan women is to support those who are keeping the hope for that future alive.

Loading...